Cryptocurrency Addresses

Since I got asked about this in an email, figured I may as well share them out.

Dogecoin: DS6JemiJDdjjDkL7u45VgzHweLCeaMdX9n
Bitcoin: 19kLLWWexwCk1N1KjedNEDhXxnSWF54r2J

Do with that what you will.

C++ 11 and Types

I've been trying to ramp up on all the language changes as part of C++ 11, and have been trying to figure out how to do something similar to XNA's Content.Load<T> as part of it, and I'm a bit stymied so far.  Let me explain.

XNA's ContentManager has a ton of features that seem like they'd work wonderfully in C++'s RAII world.  When you call .Load<T>, it first checks to see if the content has already been loaded through this particular ContentManager.  If it has, you get the cached copy back.  Otherwise, it tries to load the file, instantiates the proper type loader, caches the loaded object, then returns a reference to the object.  When ContentManager is disposed of, it handles cleaning up all of its cached objects for you.  Plus, I can keep multiple ContentManagers around: one for "common" items (characters, UX elements, etc.), and one per "level" (level-specific textures and geometry).  That way, you just dispose the level-specific content manager and start a new one up for a new level.  This pattern just screams RAII to me.  The gotcha is that each ContentManager can house multiple types.

Now at least at the moment, I'm at a loss for how to do this in a type-safe, RAII friendly manner in C++.  It's easy if I create a ContentManager per type of content to load into it (ContentManager<Texture2D>, ContentManager<LevelData>, ContentManager<BlahBlahBlah>, etc.), but then I lose the ease of working with a single object.  I could add a strongly typed reference for each type into ContentManager (ContentManager.LoadTexture2D, ContentManager.LoadLevelData, etc.), but then I lose loose coupling.  I could just keep a hash_map<string, void*> and force dynamic_cast to be used on load, but then I lose RAII cleanup of each subobject.

I'm sure there is a graceful solution to this that I just haven't found yet, but it's a fun problem space to explore.

Minor update: This weekend has taught me that I have much more to learn about the wonderful world of shared_ptr<T>.  The last major C++ codebase I worked in was a barely C++'d C codebase, so my mental model of C++ is still skewed horribly.

Stack Overflow

I've been hanging out at Stack Overflow lately trying to help out some people.


I haven't forgotten my projects here, but I don't have a lot of time over the next two months. Right now, I'm only keeping an eye out for Terraria 1.2.2's release to make sure that RomTerraria will still work with it.

In Boston This Week

Don't expect any source or blog updates this week.  I'm in Boston for work until Saturday.